Apostolos Koutropoulos recommended this November 18, 2014 - 1:52pm
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Thanks for sharing! What's your position on MOOC related research being published in closed-access sources? For me it seems a bit incogruous :)
Thanks for the insights on this, Jon. A small group of us at AU are researching ID principles for MOOCs, which don't really count as formal education but fit more closely to public education ala museums and libraries. This is not to be sneezed at, but will require attention to design, and clear articulation of the relationship between MOOC participation and credits in formal learning environments.
Cheers,
MCI
Thanks @Apostolos - I'm opposed in principle to closed journals, at least when they make use of the outputs of authors whose work is already funded from the public purse, when they use free labour by reviewers and editors, then sell it back to them at a whacking profit, denying access not only to the people that paid for it but, surprisingly often, even the writers. It made sense in times of information scarcity, where there was genuine value to be gained from printing and distributing paper journals that demanded substantial resources and expertise. It's insane now.
I'm still on the fence about author-pays versions of 'open'. On the whole I think it is an awful idea akin to vanity publishing - at the very least, it discriminates against those with lesser funding, no matter how good their research, and it accounts for a huge number of predatory emails I receive every day asking me to submit papers or join editorial committees on shady for-profit fly-by-night but vaguely 'proper' looking journals. On the other hand, there is a significant cost involved, even for fully online journals using open source software: at the very least they need admin assistance, technical support, and hosting. I'm very sad indeed to see that one of my favourite open journals, JIME, has gone down that path now, but they make a compelling case that they cannot afford to run it for free any more. It seems to me that this is a place where alternative funding, whether through governments/research councils, crowd-sourcing or even voluntary contribution might make a lot of sense. Some (including our own IRRODL) already make use of such things.
Thanks @Marti - yes, I think alternative models akin to those of museums and libraries do make sense, at least for xMOOCs. Nice way of seeing it. I'm not sure about the credits though: seems to me that this should be entirely disaggregated rather than articulated as, the moment such things are introduced, you wind up with fundamentally irresolvable conflicts between learning and accreditation. Of course, to support learning, you might ask for portfolios or similar outputs, which might be very good evidence to later use to gain certification.
cMOOCs are quite a different matter. Because the learning design (such as it is) essentially comes from the participants, they are less easily dealt with from a traditional ID perspective. We have quite a lot to say that is relevant to this in our recent book. Personally, I think most of the answers lie in the design of environments, including pedagogies and other techniques as well as virtual spaces and algorithms, that enhance the ability of the crowd to teach itself, rather than to superimpose traditional models that emerge out of mediaeval physical constraints on top of them. It's about ways of learning through networks, sets and collectives, not through the kind of learning designs that work in traditional groups, most of which just don't fit with big-scale social learning (though can work at a big scale if a largely asocial objectivist model is used). This is relatively new territory, though we have a lot to learn from earlier constructivist and informal learning research, especially in the areas of distributed cognition and communities of practice.
It would also be very useful to get away from the whole notion of objectives-driven fixed-length courses altogether - I like the library/museum framing for that. I'm quite a fan of JIT small-chunk methods that can be picked and assembled, like one might pick and assemble books or views of exhibits in a museum - Khan Academy, YouTube, Instructables, Q&A sites, StackExchange, etc - where good ID can definitely be of very great value.